But there’s a few problems with this idea, aren’t there? For a start, many artists work days jobs in the cultural sector to support their art practice. Isn’t it better for an artist, say, to work in a cultural sector than in something unrelated?

Then, there’s the role all these bureaucrats play. Presumably we like giving artists grants. Well, someone needs to collate and assess those grants, and report on them to the Treasury and generally keep the bean-counters happy.

Some of those bureaucrats are also actually delivering services – performing arts centre and art gallery administrators, for instance. A lot of arts infrastructure is also pretty highly utilised, even if we might question the quality or relevance of the actual art that goes on inside the black boxes and white cubes.

Finally, some arts centres do actually commission works, so it’s slightly disingenuous to claim they only catch it as it falls.

But in the substance of your argument, of course, I don’t think we differ. There should be much more funding given to working artists and creative groups, and much less devoted to the infrastructural and administrative “tail”.

But then again, if you don’t have something for a politician to cut a ribbon in front of, how interested are they going to be?

Pointless edifice building and ineffectual middle management seems to be the defining traits of our culture – the only way I can see it ending is to cut funding altogether.
If arts bureaucrats can’t hack life on the dole and without a city office and they all disappear it would be no great loss, and the creators will still keep creating without the dangling funding carrot.

yes, it’s pretty relative what’s ‘mainstream’ or not… i’m basing that off the distinction about culture being defined by the extent of public conversation around a given event. So mainstream arts culture (for example) might involve a front page cover story in the Spectrum on Cate doing Tennessee Williams, with five or six pages of ads(!) for STC & Opera Australia – and nary a glance of column space at the fringe stuff happening all across town (to use Sydney as an example)

you’re right it gets tricky to define though as the cultural conversation in the long tail of the blogosphere has opened up more channels of discussion around fringe events (for want of a better word)

perhaps we should abandon these terms for the new model ?!
thx for the article is food for thoughts
SZ

Peter

On the whole, I think your idea has merit and I remember when I first heard you express it that I thought you were spot on; but the question is how to implement it. There’s two stumbling blocks that need to be overcome, one venal, the other more administrative.

Firstly, government funding is always going to tend towards impressive bricks and mortar because in a three year election cycle a politician will be able to stand in front of an edifice and say “look, we did this: we are funding the arts”. It’s nowhere near as sexy to stand in front of ten scruffy creators and say “we’re paying these guys to be clever”.

My wife is doing a PhD on the design of contemporary learning environments and as part of her research has tracked how government money has continually been spent on new school buildings rather than the ongoing training of teachers and how this has caused various design and pedagogical revolutions to fail or stall. It appears that the federal government is doing exactly the same thing right now, pouring billions into new buildings but doing very little to support ongoing teacher training.

Secondly, if the government is handing out tax dollars, these need to be administered so that these funds don’t end up paying for sports cars and cocaine.

So, here’s my challenge for you: find a way to overcome Edifice addiction and a simple, cheap, less administered way to show me my tax dollars are being used appropriately. I think you’re inside the tent now, Marcus: time to stop complaining about how things are and give us some practical suggestions for how things could be.

Big fan. Long time listener, first time caller.

I am not suggesting that we create an inverted hierachy, only that we reverse the assumptions and the value chain.

What i would pick you up on is your use of the term “mainstream” arts to describe the well funded arts. By what criteria are they “mainstream”? I’d argue that by just about any definition they are niche and subcultural artforms and companies and no more represent the mainstream than any number of other niche and subcultural activities.But that’s a different argument for another day!

mix metaphors aside, i disagree that the ‘cultural heirarchy’ should be flipped. that would simply create another heirarchy (albeit arguably a more democratic one).

However your point about the spaces of creation is well made – given the broad scale of what defines ‘culture’ i’d like to posit that Culture=Conversation. So Australian culture has a very public conversation about sport, and to an extent, the arts gets some off the press too. As you suggest the majority of this conversation revolves around the mainstream arts scene, STC, Opera Australia, MTC (etc).

Not much of the conversation is about fringe artmaking or the street level creativity you mentioned. what is said is vastly outweighed by the range of creative activities going on out there. And the various arts writers and critics (not to mention their editors) appear to have no interest in pursuing this important cultural phenomena on a street level.

So it’s up to us to create that interest in each other’s work so ALL the arts in this country becomes a part of our conversation, not just the chosen ones.